Monday, June 29, 2009

Learning from Computer Games?

I discovered this video of Battlefield 2142 gameplay a few weeks ago and found it interesting for the amount of learning that actually is taking place in the game:

The video depicts a teams of players, each who has individual and unique responsibilities on a combat assault team. The players can access the game form remote sites and may never have met each other in person. In this version of the game, players must work together to coordinate an attack in order to capture an enemy flag. A direct attack is not feasible due to overwhelming enemy forces, so the squad leader modifies plans and instead opts for an assault along a circuitous route. While communicating with squad members via VoIP, focusing on the immediate tactical aspects of the current operation, the squad leader is also managing the broader strategy of his team's performance in the game via a heads-up-display of the battlefield and prepositioning combat resources accordingly. What the game provides, therefore, is an engaging 3D experience with numerous complex layers that interact with each other during real-time while demanding the player to instantaneously evaluate emergent challenges in the environment, create a hypothesis on how to deal with these challenges based on existing game resources and player capabilities, test this hypothesis for validity, and, if necessary, make any changes to the hypothesis and allow for retesting. Clearly, there is a lot of learning going on in computer games.

By the way, you can view my Battlefield 2142 statistics here: Doktor_Frag

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About The DigiBahn Project

My research interests address how immersive digital game environments can be leveraged to teach humanities topics and to assist in the second language acquisition process. My current research project focuses on using narrative structures in first-person 3D computer games as a means of organizing and communicating sociocultural knowledge in support of second language acquisition.